Student Poetry Collection: October 2023
Childhood Seasons
In the shade between our houses lived a bleeding heart
that of the earth and one day to be mine
That was the coldest place in summertime
where the grass always felt damp on my bare feet as I tiptoed to the gate
into the backyard with the swings that squeaked
Sometimes playing by myself like an only child
Training wheels and frightening, fat caterpillars in the sandy part of the garden box
Carrot tops kissing my knees hello and goodbye when I balanced atop it, pretending to be a tightrope walker
An autumn ritual I still indulge in is the crunching of dry, dead leaves beneath my shoes
I never wore sunscreen back then
Discomfort only came to me in winter:
a lumpy coat with a backpack over top,
seams of socks digging into me, making indents, leaving lint between my toes
where I'd rather feel smooth particles of sand at the purple park
Lie down and fill my hair up with it
I'd get so dirty and I wouldn't even care
But yeah, winter has always been hard
This one time on the walk to kindergarten, just out the door
I slipped on ice and landed on my face
Mom carried me inside, only to make me go later anyway
with a goose egg on my forehead
So embarrassing
"It's a miracle!" was a remark at the fresh, high snow that made my mom laugh
My first winter memory, it's still fond
Springtime brings daffodils like my granma once got me
They're still my favourite flower solely for that reason
Minority seasons are my favourite because so suddenly they turn into extremities
or maybe it's not so sudden and I've just been too busy growing up to realize that
Jude Lorenzen
Untitled
There will be no flowers at my funeral. There will be no white lilies stuck to cherrywood casket, there will be no pre-wilting roses or orchids weeping in the iron fist of a father or Forget-Me-Nots in a sisters palms… Instead, I imagine my funeral as I am: there is a thing lost at sea. It is weathered by salt water and unanchored. It is sinking, at my funeral, the sky opens her mouth to pour. At my funeral, the river overflows. Flowers do not grow underwater. I learned this from a sister. I learned that grief is a thing of threes: there is no room in a mourning house for a fourth flood. I live in rooms full of water and shipwrecks. I do not miss the flowers. Really, I have never seen them. At Night, I dream of a sister I’ve never met. She has no head. Just hands. And she holds me as if my spine was always meant to be bent. Curled into her arms. Cradled. I dream of funerals, and home grown alliums. I dream of newly dead sons. And their mothers. There is ivy tickling my chin, soft earth a cushion underneath my heavy skull. Truthfully, I am already there—I hear the soil is warm this time of year.
Fern Waniandy
Fiamma and the Infirm
When I started saying that you have to love somebody a lot to show up in their dreams
You with the prey shape
You with the open blue lips for your little blood sugar cookies
Doting on the wetness I had just yawned into my eyes
I materialised between your legs on your big bed
In your log cabin like a ghost you had summoned with the complicated heat of your desire
You were wearing thick wool socks and scratching your husky behind the ears
When you looked down at me, your eyes were alarmed and unkind
You wanted to touch me so you did
Not let me at you
No matter how much I whined, the husky must not have existed before I left you
I was blocking out a costume for Fright Night in the house by the sea
I had a fuzzy police hat, but nothing to wear with it
Mama tried to put me in a wig made of soft clovers
I could never be embarrassed by how desperately and profoundly I wanted to charm you because it was the single
Purest want of both our lives
Outside of the house by the sea I spoke to somebody’s daddy in German but he answered in delineated English
Then asked me with sudden gentleness if I was a spy for the Fatherland
Before you stopped showing up, an empty nightclub made of concrete
I bent over the cold railing and shouted at a man in the vast pit below, “Have you seen a little white square of paper with German words on it?”, but I was making everything up
Because I left for Stuttgart and never saw you again
Because there wasn’t any red in your thin black hair anymore
Because you looked young and pale and oppressively harmless
Because we are all going back in time
I didn’t know how else to get to the woman who looked like you in my generous and faithless peripheral vision
When you called out to me my legs gave out and I knelt by your swivel chair
With my forearms on the armrests like a dog
If we went ten more years back you wouldn’t be married, if we went twenty more years back you wouldn’t be moribund, and if you were my age you might not even be so soft and ill in the brain yet so I might really have
Licked your nose if you hadn’t started laughing
Emma Pemmann
The clock in the darkness.
Lonely
She sat in the darkness
waiting for the Lark to sing
The itch doesn’t pass, the need to grow the tree
But the flowers do not last in the darkness
Alone
What must she do, but
Turn down the lamps,
Quench the dying hearth,
and Face her own darkness
See the line:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
DueDay
But not today
Relief comes tomorrow,
Today we slave away to face the darkness
And banish the Lark’s song so that we might
Focus
On the paper to become.
And slay the demons that spring from the tardy pink slip
To beat the army before the clock ticks,
Tick Tock, Tick Tock,
The Mouse runs the clock
Bang goes the hammer
And smash,
The Mouse Drops.
Avani Carstensen-Sinha